1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an automatic speech translation system, and more particularly, to an automatic speech translation method and system based on a corresponding sentence template.
2. Discussion of Related Art
Generally, three steps are needed for automatic speech translation: a speech recognition step of converting speech in one language into a written sentence, a language translation step of translating the sentence into another language, and a speech synthesis step of producing and outputting speech corresponding to the translated sentence. Here, each step commonly uses text sentences as input/output.
However, these three steps in the automatic speech translation process have been developed to be performed independently. This causes that the same kinds of processes are repeated in each step. Consequently, not only the efficiency of overall translation process is poor, but also the quality of overall automatic speech translation tends to be poorer due to the error accumulation of repeated processes.
That is, even though morpheme analysis data is used in the speech recognition step, the speech recognition result is output simply as text which is morpheme-analyzed or parsed again in the language translation step. Also, the sentence output from the language translation step is transferred to the speech synthesis step in text form where it is morpheme-analyzed yet again in order to extract syntax data, prosody data, and so on.
During these steps, processing errors may be accumulated, thereby degrading automatic speech translation performance.